Walter had spent the better part of an hour canvassing the Hollows for any trace of Maxwell and IT. When they had returned to the blacksmith’s and found him unconscious and severely injured, Marigold and Elvie had rushed him to a healer. This left Walter to piecing together the mysterious disappearances. He wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t even sure how he had ended up down here searching for a lost human in the first place. Walter seemed to be propelled forward by forces beyond his understanding. It was all a shambles.

It wasn’t until he reached the checkpoint and found the half-unconscious guards that he discovered what had happened. A whack on the head had not made the already oblique creatures any more coherent, but he could discern the basic details of what happened: someone rocky from above had assaulted them; she had been with a companion dressed in far too many clothes; the companion had escaped her and hidden in a trade wagon, and she had failed to catch up with him, instead boarding emergency transport back to the Junction carrying a little robot under one arm. It was all very unwelcome news.

The entire way back to the smithy, Walter ruminated about just how dire their situation was. What could they possibly do now? Perhaps he could just stay down here in the Hollows. It would make him harder to find. That idea lasted for all of five seconds before queasiness at the thought of making a home in the surrounding squalor set in.

Back at the smithy, Marigold and Elvie had still not returned, and Walter set about straightening out the workshop, only to realize he did not know how to arrange blacksmith tongs and hammers. He picked up a broom and absentmindedly swept the blackened floor instead. Eventually, Marigold returned alone from the healer.

“Will he be OK?” Walter asked.

“They think so, but it will take time. Elvie’s going to stay with him.”

Walter set the broom against the wall and pulled up a stool next to Marigold.

“I’m sorry this happened,” he said.

Don’t do that. Don’t pretend. You think she’ll realize how wonderful you are because you care about her ex-boyfriend?”

He studied the lines on Marigold’s face. She was barely holding it together. Coming back to the smithy and finding Thales sprawled out and Maxwell gone had crushed her. She seemed as if she might cry. He wanted to console her—hug her or pat her on the back, but he did not know her well enough. It seemed far too forward. Instead, he tried to think of the right thing to say, but it was Marigold who spoke first.

“Did you find anything out?”

“Well, yes, in a way. It’s a little unfortunate, but I did obtain some information—”

“Just tell me, Walter.”

“He’s gone,” Walter said. He had been thinking for the last half-hour about how he might break the news to Marigold, but two words were all he had managed in the end.

“Gone where?”

“Down the Old Road. One of the trade wagons carted him off somewhere.”

“But why would he do that?”

Walter explained what he had been told.

“So, it was Av’enna. I knew it.” Marigold thought about this for a while. “She didn’t capture him though?”

“No, they said he hid.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“Is it? He could be in any of a thousand different places, and that’s assuming the driver didn’t eat him first.”

Marigold was shaking slightly, and Walter regretted his usual negativity. She looked tired and old beyond her years.

“Why are you doing this?” Walter asked. “Let someone else take care of this. I understand how serious this is, but there are organizations that can handle this better than us . . . entire organizations. We’ll just explain what happened and someone will listen.”

“They won’t though. I’ve seen it before. The Ægency, the MAP, Central Processing, they all make plans and follow procedures, but a genuine crisis like this is something you can’t anticipate. They’ll force Maxwell into a slot he doesn’t fit, and it’ll all be over.”

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Walter looked Marigold in the eyes. They were rimmed in cracked gold, black in the center, black and bottomless.

“But why are you really doing this?”

Marigold looked away.

“You know who I am, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know I’m supposed to become the primary Caretaker for the Backend when my father retires.”

“So I’ve heard, though I’ve never really understood what that entails.”

“Not very much at all anymore. The Caretaker used to tend the World Cauldron, but that ceased to be the case after the war. Now it’s mostly ceremonial, opening council sessions, anointing the new archon, that kind of thing.”

“I’m not making the connection between that and this.”

“I gave it all up. I didn’t want it. My father expected me to take up his mantle, but it had always seemed pointless to me. That’s why I came down here with Av’enna and Thales. I thought I could be something else. I guess we were all just running away. What were we going to change down here?”

Marigold shifted her weight to her other foot. She was staring at the anvil in the middle of the room.

“It felt revolutionary. We wanted to organize the creatures in the Hollows. Create a genuine alternative to the bureaucracy and endless grind of the rest of the Backend—the constant quantifying of every second of our days. We idealized the way things were before the War when magic and myth made up the world. We thought the creatures down here might just need the right push to reclaim that. But we were naïve. The creatures here didn’t need organizing, and they certainly didn’t need a couple of well-off creatures from the outside telling them what to do.”

“I see,” Walter said, trying his best not to take offense, but doing a rather poor job of it.

“I stayed longer than I should have. Av’enna left first. She hated it here from the moment we arrived, but I still thought Thales and I could change things. At some point, he stopped wanting to. He liked it here. He liked the peace. That was when my mother tracked me down. She got word through one of the merchants that I had broken my father’s heart—that I had shamed the family and destroyed our legacy. She begged me to come back.”

Marigold went silent.

“And?” Walter asked.

“And I did. I convinced myself that I was doing no good down here, that if I had the power to change things back home, I had a responsibility to at least try. I left the Hollows behind and took up a caretaking position at the MAP, and that’s where I still am, still waiting for my father to retire, doing nothing.”

“So, all of this is to prove you can change things,” Walter said.

“Change anything,” Marigold replied. “Even just this one thing.”

Quite the ego on her, huh?

Marigold pursed her lips. “I know. It’s ridiculous.”

“It’s not ridiculous, it’s admirable. I’ve lived a long time, Marigold, and I’ve seen few with your resolve and none with your competency. If anyone is going to fix this mess, I believe it’s going to be you, but . . .”

Walter hesitated, and Marigold finally looked back at him. “But what?”

“But don’t let your parents’ burdens be your own. That is something I have seen time and time again over the years.”

Marigold nodded and smiled slightly. “Thank you, Walter.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, returning her smile.

Marigold straightened her apron, exhaled loudly, and stood up. “OK,” she said. “We find Maxwell. That’s the first order of business. Then we find our way back here and down to the Cauldron.”

“What about the robot?” Walter asked. The robot’s fate had only just occurred to Walter, and he could imagine the vacuum cleaner berating him for not being more concerned.

“We have to hope IT can handle itself for a while.”

“And how do we find Maxwell?” Walter asked.

“If he’s heading down the Old Road, we head out after him. We hope that he’ll stop at some point and let us catch up.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then we keep going.”

Marigold looked heroic in the dim lighting of the smithy, more than heroic . . .

Water to your fire, isn’t she? Think how glorious it would be—

He stood up and made for the front door. Before he could open it, the smaller wooden door built into it swung open and Elvie walked into the room. Her eyes were red, her small furry cheeks still wet with tears.

“My friends before you depart, I would have a word,” she said.

“What is it?” Marigold asked. She was still clearly annoyed by the creature but trying to be sympathetic to her pain.

“The creature that did this thing to my husband. Do you truly believe it to be the one known as Av’enna?”

“Probably,” Marigold said.

“The one who was once your ally?”

“We lived together for a few months.”

“Then know this: the creature deserves the swiftest justice. Will you promise to mete it out? I would come myself were Thales not in such a precarious state.”

“Our goal isn’t really to confront Av’enna. We just need to find Maxwell.”

“But you do plan to leave the Hollows, do you not? And she is trying to thwart your progress, is she not? Is it not likely that your paths will cross?”

“Maybe,” Marigold said.

“Then promise to be as harsh with her as she was with Thales.”

Marigold blinked. “OK.”

Elvie held out her hand toward the frog. Marigold bent down to shake it but in one swift motion, Elvie took out her dagger and pricked Marigold’s hand on the palm, drawing it along her hand. She quickly pushed their palms together.

“Ow,” Marigold said.

“Now you have sworn it in blood. See that it is done.”

“It was nice to meet you,” Walter said, tipping his hat and keeping his appendages far away from the gerbil.

“Psycho,” Marigold muttered under her breath as they left the smithy.

Walter followed Marigold outside.

You could’ve crushed the little one, you know.

“I’m not crushing anyone,” Walter said.

Marigold stopped and looked at Walter. “What?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

“You’re kind of strange, aren’t you?” Marigold said, looking over at him.

Walter hung his head and nodded slowly.

Marigold walked over and patted him on the back. “That’s not a bad thing,” she added.